George Chapman

“ First gold-lock'd Hymen did to church repair,
Like a quick off'ring burn'd in flames of hair.
And after, with a virgin firmament,
The godhead-proving bride attended went
Before them all, she look'd in her command,
As if form-giving Cypria's silver hand
Gript all their beauties, and crush'd out one flame;
She blush'd to see how beauty overcame
The thoughts of all men. Next before her went
Five lovely children, deck'd with ornament
Of her sweet colours, bearing torches by,
For light was held a happy augury
Of generation, whose efficient right
Is nothing else but to produce to light. ”

“ In his dear Eucharis; for women never
Love beauty in their sex, but envy ever.
His judgment yet, that durst not suit address,
Nor past due means, presume of due success,
Reason gat fortune in the end to speed
To his best prayers: but strange it seem'd indeed,
That fortune should a chaste affection bless:
Preferment seldom graceth bashfulness.
Nor grac'd it Hymen yet; but many a dart,
And many an amorous thought, enthrall'd his heart,
Ere he obtain'd her; and he sick became,
Forc'd to abstain her sight, and then the flame
Raged in his bosom. ”

“ Yet for her strangeness still she pleas'd their eyes;
And for her smallness they admir'd her so,
They thought her perfect born, and could not grow.
All eyes were on her: Hero did command
An altar deck'd with sacred state should stand
At the feast's upper end, close by the bride,
On which the pretty nymph might sit espied.
Then all were silent; every one so hears,
As all their senses climb'd into their ears:
And first this amorous tale, that fitted well
Fair Hero and the nuptials, she did tell:
The Tale of Teras. ”

“ The name of Chapman should always be held great; yet must it always at first recall the names of greater men. For one who thinks of him as the author of his best play or his loftiest lines of gnomic verse a score will at once remember him as the translator of Homer or the continuator of Marlowe. The most daring enterprise of a life which was full of daring aspiration and arduous labour was this of resuming and completing the 'mighty line' of Hero and Leander. ”

“ Who—who are you?" gasped Tom, when he had recovered his breath.
"I—I—who are you?" came the quick retort, and the voice was suspicious. Whoever it was evidently was not going to be caught by a prowling monitor.
"George Abbot!" gasped Tom, as he recognized the voice of his chum.
"What in the world is the rush? What's the hurry?"
"News! I've got great news!" cried George. "Cats! But you knocked the wind out of me all right. I—I was coming fast myself, I guess. Where are you going?"
"Out," replied Tom briefly. "But what's the news?"
"Better not go," advised George, speaking more composedly now. ”

“ For that poem stands out alone amid all the wide and wild poetic wealth of its teeming and turbulent age, as might a small shrine of Parian sculpture amid the rank splendour of a tropic jungle. But no metaphor can aptly express the rapture of relief with which you come upon it amid the poems of Chapman, and drink once more with your whole heart of that well of sweet water after the long draughts you have taken from such brackish and turbid springs as gush up among the sands and thickets of his verse. ”

“ If it had been two Juniors who acted the way those fellow did I don't know that we would have such a kick coming, but when a member of your own class turns against you it's time to do something!"
"Hurray!" cried George. "What are you going to do, fellows? Will you let me in on it? Will you haze 'em? Say, you'll let me have part in it; won't you?"
"Hold on, George!" begged Tom with a smile. "Just shut off your gas, throw back your spark, and put on the brakes. You're skidding a bit." ”

“ Hike!"
"He doesn't give himself any airs; does he? Oh no!" exclaimed Bert sarcastically, as he jogged along beside his chums.
"Oh, that's the way with all Seniors," said Jack.
"I hope we'll not be," murmured Tom.
"Do you think we will?" asked George Abbot. "I wonder what makes Seniors think they're so high and mighty? Do you think we'll make this run? Will———"
"Foolish question number six thousand four hundred and twenty-one!" interrupted Tom, with a laugh. "Now if you're going to start on your interrogatory stunt, Georgie my lad, you'll make this run alone. ”

“ The inscription of Chapman's Iliad to Prince Henry is one of his highest and purest examples of moral verse: the august praise and grave exaltation of his own great art give dignity to the words of admonition as much as of appeal with which he commends it to the acceptance and reverence of kings. We may well believe that the prince's death gave to the high heart of his old Homeric teacher and counsellor of royal and heroic things a sharper pain than the mere sense of a patron lost and of personal as well as of national hopes cut off. ”

“ In the tragedy of Revenge for Honour I have already noticed the curious change of style which distinguishes it from all other works of Chapman: a change from rigidity to relaxation, from energy to fluency, from concentration to effusion of language. It has something of the manner and metre of Fletcher and his school, something of the softness and facility which lend a half effeminate grace to the best scenes of Shirley ”

“ So much it may suffice to say of Chapman as an original poet, one who held of no man and acknowledged no master, but from the birth of Marlowe well-nigh to the death of Jonson held on his own hard and haughty way of austere and sublime ambition, not without kindly and graceful inclination of his high grey head to salute such younger and still nobler compeers as Jonson and Fletcher. ”

“ Even Chapman, from whom I may be thought to have wandered somewhat far in this inquiry as to what is or is not properly definable as obscurity, has in my judgment a sounder instinct of dramatic dialogue and movement than the illustrious writer who has carved out for himself in the second period of his career a new and better way to the end appointed by nature for the exercise of his highest powers; and Chapman was certainly not remarkable among the great men of his day for the specially dramatic bent of his genius. ”

“ John Chapman lived to be a man of some standing in the parish of Swaffham, though tradition saith that he altered but little his simple manner of living, and did not give up his bi-annual excursions until years after the necessity for carrying his pack with him had gone by. It is also supposed that he strengthened the ties that held him to the place by taking unto him a wife; and I am led to place some faith in this, from the fact that there once existed in the north aisle a seat, on which was carved the effigy of a pedlar with his pack and dog, and his wife looking over the door of a shop ”

“ One at least, and not he who had drunk deepest of the divine and dangerous spring, seems at times under its influence to move and speak as under some Circean transformation, The learning of Jonson, doubtless far wider and sounder than that of Chapman, never allowed or allured him to exchange for a turbid and tortious jargon the vigorous purity of his own English spirit and style. ”

“ Under no circumstances, probably, would Chapman have been always a pure and harmonious writer, capable of casting into fit and radiant form the dark hard masses of bis deep and ardent thought, of uttering the weighty and noble things he had to say in a fluent and lucid style; but as it was, he appears from first to last to have erected his natural defects into an artificial system, and cultivated his incapacities as other men cultivate their faculties. ”

“ But of pure passion and instinctive simplicity of desire or delight there is little more trace than of higher emotion or deeper knowledge of such things as belong alike to mind and body, and hold equally of the spirit and the flesh.
Here again we find that Jonson and Chapman stand far apart from their fellow men of genius. The most ambitious and the most laborious poets of their day, conscious of high aims and large capacities, they would be content with no crown that might be shared by others ”

“ A Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophie; and His Amorous Zodiacke with a translation of a Latine coppie, written by a Fryer, Anno Dom. 1400 (1595, 2nd ed. 1639) , a collection of poems frequently quoted from in England’s Parnassus (1600) ; “De Guiana, carmen epicum,” a poem prefixed to Lawrence Keymis’s A Relation of the second voyage to Guiana (1596) ; Hero and Leander. Begun by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman (1598) ; The Blinde begger of Alexandria, most pleasantly discoursing his variable humours . . . (acted 1596, printed 1598) , a popular comedy ”

“ His rarest jewels of thought and verse detachable from the context lie embedded in the tragedy of Caesar and Pompey, whence the finest of them were first extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical genius of Charles Lamb. In most of his tragedies the lofty and labouring spirit of Chapman may be said rather to shine fitfully through parts than steadily to pervade the whole; they show nobly altogether as they stand, but even better by help of excerpts and selections. ”

“ I am not disinclined to admit the supposition that Chapman might have applied his power of moral thought and his interest in historic action to other ends than they ever served in literature or in life, But neither for his sake nor for ours am I disposed to regret that circumstance or destiny should have impelled or induced him to take instead that way of work which has given his memory a right to live with that of men who could never have taken another way than they took; which has made it honourable and venerable to all who have any reverence for English poetry or regard for English fame ”

“ By the change of instrument alone a critic of the higher class may at once verify the change of object. In almost every page of Chapman's noblest work we discern the struggle and the toil of a powerful mind convulsed and distended as by throes of travail in the effort to achieve something that lies beyond the proper aim and the possible scope of that form of art within which it has set itself to work. ”

“ They don’t look to be very husky.”
“That’s right,” agreed Tom’s chum.
“Ha! No plotting!” cried the ringleader, giving Tom a dig in the ribs.
“I’ll give you that back with interest when I get the chance,” murmured our hero.
Other parties of hazers made their appearance in the corridor, some leading Bert Wilson and George Abbot.
“Where are you taking me? What are you [91] going to do? Is this allowed?” fired George at his captors.
“Sure it’s allowed, you little question mark!” exclaimed a Sophomore. “Trot along now.”
Tom and his chums were led over the campus. ”

“ The passage in The Gentleman Usher (act iv. scene 3) which sets forth the excellence of perfect marriage has less of poetic illustration and imaginative colour, but is a no less admirable model of clear and vigorous language applied to the fit and full expression of high thought and noble emotion. But as a rule we find the genius of Chapman at its best when furthest removed from female influence; as in the two plays of Biron and those nobler parts of the "Roman tragedy" of Cæsar and Pompey in which Cato discourses on life and death. ”

“ If the union of active interest with superb declamation may suffice to explain the prolonged good fortune of Chapman's first tragedy on the boards, we can discover no such pretext to account for the apparent favour shown to his next venture in the same field, It has no passage comparable for force and vehemence of imagination to the highest moods of the author of Bussy d'Ambois ”

“ To his first poem, short as it is, Chapman appends a glossary to explain the accumulated allusions of a mythological kind, with this note at the foot of it: "For the rest of his own invention, figures and similes, touching their aptness and novelty, he hath not laboured to justify them, because he hopes they will be proved enough to justify themselves, and prove sufficiently authentical to such as understand them; for the rest, God help them" (for the poet evidently will not) , "I cannot do as others, make day seem a lighter woman than she is, by painting her." ”

“ Although the first standard edition of Brantôme's Lives was not published by a descendant of his family till thirty-two years after the death of Chapman, it is singular that the English poet who thought fit to choose as a subject for tragedy the fate of a man at the time of whose murder he had himself reached the age of twenty should also have thought fit so seriously to alter the facts of his story for no discernible reason but a desire to shift the charge of the principal villainy from the shoulders of a king to those of his brother. ”

“ The indomitable force and fire of Chapman's genius have given such breath and spirit to his Homeric poems that whatever their faults and flaws may be they are at least not those of other men's versions ”

“ Chapman's apology for the attribution of this name to the apparently imaginary avenger of his brother's blood is better worth remembering than such inquiries are worth pursuing. "Poor envious souls they are," says the poet, "that cavil at truth's want in these natural fictions;" a reasonable and memorable protest against the perverse or senseless paradox which confounds truth with fact, and refuses to distinguish veracity from reality ”

“ This bitterness of insinuation or invective against meaner scholars or artists we should set down rather to a genuine hatred of bad work, genuine abhorrence of base ambition and false pretence, than to any unjust or malevolent instinct of mere jealousy; which yet might perhaps be found pardonable to the neglected and laborious old age of a high-minded artist and hard-working scholar such as Chapman, There are impressive touches of a higher mood in the funeral hymn which completes the somewhat voluminous tribute of ceremonial verse offered up at the grave of Lord Russell ”